Technical Field
The present invention relates to audio playback technology.
Background Art
One effect that is commonly applied to music signals is audio slicing. Audio slicing allows a user to define a desired start point and end point to create a slice of music signal data from a given music signal.
Patent Document 1 (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2001-306069) discloses one conventional technology for implementing an audio slicing feature, for example. In this conventional technology, the user can edit performance data divided into a plurality of segments. A series of blocks that represent each segment are displayed. The user uses the mouse pointer to select a block. The user can then drag the edges of the selected block (that is, the positions where divisions between the selected block and the adjacent blocks are inserted) to change the length of the selected block (and the length of the segment represented thereby). The lengths of the adjacent blocks are updated automatically. After the length of a block is changed, icons are displayed at the positions where the divisions between blocks were previously located for the user's reference. To play back the performance data when no segment is selected, the user uses a restart switch to move a grid pointer to the beginning of the performance data and then uses a start playback switch to play the performance data to the very end thereof. When a segment is selected, the restart switch moves the grid pointer to the beginning of the selected segment, and the start playback switch plays the performance data though to the end of the selected segment.